Jens-Peer Kuska wrote:
>Hi,
>
>how can we "reproduce" the problem on our own
>machines ?
>how can we see what your initial cell does ?
>
>In general you should set up a different cell for
>Get[] and Needs[] to be sure, that the variables
>in the packages are parsed and added to the symbol
>table first. And than make a second cell with you
>own definitions. This was a problem with an older
>Mathematica version, that the parser scan the cell
>before the kernel evaluate it and so the parser
>create the symbols before it got the definition
>for it from the evaluation of Get[]/Needs[]
>
>Regards
> Jens
>
>"leigh pascoe" <leigh at cephb.fr> schrieb im
>Newsbeitrag news:dkfcjb$eo5$1 at smc.vnet.net...
>| Dear Mathgroup,
>|
>| I tried to post this question a few days ago,
>but it didn't appear. I
>| assume this was because I pasted in error
>messages from Mathematica in
>| non text form, so I'll try again.
>|
>| I have a notebook with an initial cell that
>calls Combinatorica and
>| contains a number of function definitions of the
>set delayed type. Each
>| time I open the notebook I seem to get a
>different behaviour when I
>| evaluate the first cell. Two different sets of
>messages resulting from
>| an evaluation of the first cell are pasted in
>below this message.
>|
>|
>| Most recently I did the following:
>|
>| 1. Start Ma and open the file. Evaluate the
>first cell. This gives me
>| the long list of error messages pasted in below.
>| 2. Then close Ma without saving anything.
>Restart Ma and reopen the
>| notebook, without evaluating the first cell. I
>then opened a new
>| notebook and pasted the definitions from the
>original notebook and
>| evaluated them one at a time. No error messages.
>|
>| Other times I get a single warning about using
>the variable "list"
>| (defined inside a module) that is similar to
>"List". Does Ma remember
>| data from previous sessions even though I have
>closed the program? What
>| am I not understanding here??
>|
>| Ma 5.0 Windows XP Pro
>|
>| Thanks
>|
>| LP
>
>
>Clip
Dear Jens,
Thank you for your response and suggestions. I am used to debugging code
with errors, and the point of my question was not to find a particular
error in the initialisation cell. What I found astonishing was that I
could have different behaviour from what seemed to be identical inputs.
I think my problem may have been related to the questions regarding
"whitespace" and "cell execution dependence" discussed in this forum. In
any case I seem to have cured it by spacing out the cell a bit and
making sure that comments are on separate lines from code. I had also
been using the forms (* comment *), (*comment*), ( * comment * ), (
*comment* ), more or less indiscriminately wrt whitespaces? I have
corrected this so that all comments are in the first form with no space
between the left bracket and the asterisk.
I will also put the package calls in a separate first cell - thanks for
the hint.
LP